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Now normally I wouldn't dare put a Hagarita thread into Main, but this must be an exception....
Sammy Hagar's memoir, "Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock," doesn't comes out until March, but I've just finished reading an advance copy and I can tell you that there's one poor guy who's going to wish it had never seen the light of day: Eddie Van Halen.
Sammy's one of the nicest guys I've met in rock 'n' roll, but Marin's Red Rocker shows his former Van Halen bandmate no mercy, portraying Eddie as more street person than guitar god.
This is Sammy describing him just before their Van Halen reunion tour in 2003: "I hadn't seen him in 10 years. He looked like he hadn't bathed in a week. He certainly hadn't changed his clothes in at least that long. He wasn't wearing a shirt. He had on a giant overcoat and army pants, tattered and ripped at the cuffs, held up with a piece of rope. I'd never seen him so skinny in my life. He was missing a number of teeth and the ones he had left were black. His boots were so worn out he had gaffer's tape wrapped around them and his big toe still stuck out."
In passages like that, "Red" reads like one of those angry e-mails we write when we're really ticked off at someone and need to vent by trashing him or her. But once we chill out, most of us don't hit the send button. With this book, Sammy hits the send button.
And he hits it over and over. After describing the squalor that he claims Eddie lived in, Sammy lays into him again, writing: "This was Eddie Van Halen, one of the sweetest guys I'd ever met. He had turned into the weirdest (expletive) I'd ever seen, crude, rude and unkempt."
So how do you really feel, Sammy?
After his "I Can't Drive 55" made him an arena-level headliner, Sammy joined Van Halen in the mid-'80s, replacing David Lee Roth, another guy he has no use for.
"I hated Dave," he writes. "The guy rubbed me wrong. I'm sure I rub all kinds of people wrong, so it's not like I'm putting him down. The guy was a great front man, great attitude in rock, and had an image from hell, but I just couldn't stand the guy. He was the opposite of what I believed in and what I am. First of all, the guy's not a great singer and he acts like he's the coolest, hottest guy in the world when, to me, he looks gay."
I don't know who's going to be more upset by that, Roth or gay people?
Settled down now at 63, Sammy writes ecstatically about his second and current wife and their contented family life. But when he was younger and his first marriage was on the skids, he took full advantage of his rock star status during his decade as lead singer of Van Halen.
"I was eating in the greatest restaurants, drinking the finest wine, flying on private jets, walking on stage to sold-out audiences going crazy. The only thing missing was ... I don't think anything was missing."
Groupies certainly weren't missing. Like the other members of what Sammy calls "the biggest rock band in the world," he had his own sex tent underneath the stage. Roadies would stock it with "five or six girls" every night, and Sammy writes about getting it on with them during Van Halen's nightly guitar solo. On this particular subject, he reveals a little more than I'd prefer to know, but it will probably sell a lot of books.
It seems like everything Sammy does makes money. At the beginning of his career, he was smart enough to buy the "architectural wonder" of a house on Mount Tam where he still lives for only $60,000 down, a pittance now. He was on the road a lot, so he started a successful travel agency in Mill Valley. He has a profitable fire sprinkler company in Fontana, the blue collar Southern California town where he grew up. And his Cabo Wabo Cantina in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, has spun off into franchises in Lake Tahoe and other places.
More recently, he made headlines when he sold his Cabo Wabo tequila company to the Campari Group for $80 million in a deal that lets him keep 20 percent of the business.
"If I wanted to be a billionaire, I probably could," he writes. "It's probably not that hard. But I'm not interested."
From that, it's clear that Sammy, with Joel Selvin, didn't write "Red" for the money. So he must have had other motives, like getting even with the Van Halen brothers, Eddie and Al, for not showing up at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2007, leaving him and bassist Mike Anthony to go it alone.
The question of whether Sammy quit Van Halen or was fired doesn't really get answered in "Red," as far as I can tell. One thing it does do, though — "Red" is hot enough to burn bridges.
Sammy Hagar's memoir, "Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock," doesn't comes out until March, but I've just finished reading an advance copy and I can tell you that there's one poor guy who's going to wish it had never seen the light of day: Eddie Van Halen.
Sammy's one of the nicest guys I've met in rock 'n' roll, but Marin's Red Rocker shows his former Van Halen bandmate no mercy, portraying Eddie as more street person than guitar god.
This is Sammy describing him just before their Van Halen reunion tour in 2003: "I hadn't seen him in 10 years. He looked like he hadn't bathed in a week. He certainly hadn't changed his clothes in at least that long. He wasn't wearing a shirt. He had on a giant overcoat and army pants, tattered and ripped at the cuffs, held up with a piece of rope. I'd never seen him so skinny in my life. He was missing a number of teeth and the ones he had left were black. His boots were so worn out he had gaffer's tape wrapped around them and his big toe still stuck out."
In passages like that, "Red" reads like one of those angry e-mails we write when we're really ticked off at someone and need to vent by trashing him or her. But once we chill out, most of us don't hit the send button. With this book, Sammy hits the send button.
And he hits it over and over. After describing the squalor that he claims Eddie lived in, Sammy lays into him again, writing: "This was Eddie Van Halen, one of the sweetest guys I'd ever met. He had turned into the weirdest (expletive) I'd ever seen, crude, rude and unkempt."
So how do you really feel, Sammy?
After his "I Can't Drive 55" made him an arena-level headliner, Sammy joined Van Halen in the mid-'80s, replacing David Lee Roth, another guy he has no use for.
"I hated Dave," he writes. "The guy rubbed me wrong. I'm sure I rub all kinds of people wrong, so it's not like I'm putting him down. The guy was a great front man, great attitude in rock, and had an image from hell, but I just couldn't stand the guy. He was the opposite of what I believed in and what I am. First of all, the guy's not a great singer and he acts like he's the coolest, hottest guy in the world when, to me, he looks gay."
I don't know who's going to be more upset by that, Roth or gay people?
Settled down now at 63, Sammy writes ecstatically about his second and current wife and their contented family life. But when he was younger and his first marriage was on the skids, he took full advantage of his rock star status during his decade as lead singer of Van Halen.
"I was eating in the greatest restaurants, drinking the finest wine, flying on private jets, walking on stage to sold-out audiences going crazy. The only thing missing was ... I don't think anything was missing."
Groupies certainly weren't missing. Like the other members of what Sammy calls "the biggest rock band in the world," he had his own sex tent underneath the stage. Roadies would stock it with "five or six girls" every night, and Sammy writes about getting it on with them during Van Halen's nightly guitar solo. On this particular subject, he reveals a little more than I'd prefer to know, but it will probably sell a lot of books.
It seems like everything Sammy does makes money. At the beginning of his career, he was smart enough to buy the "architectural wonder" of a house on Mount Tam where he still lives for only $60,000 down, a pittance now. He was on the road a lot, so he started a successful travel agency in Mill Valley. He has a profitable fire sprinkler company in Fontana, the blue collar Southern California town where he grew up. And his Cabo Wabo Cantina in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, has spun off into franchises in Lake Tahoe and other places.
More recently, he made headlines when he sold his Cabo Wabo tequila company to the Campari Group for $80 million in a deal that lets him keep 20 percent of the business.
"If I wanted to be a billionaire, I probably could," he writes. "It's probably not that hard. But I'm not interested."
From that, it's clear that Sammy, with Joel Selvin, didn't write "Red" for the money. So he must have had other motives, like getting even with the Van Halen brothers, Eddie and Al, for not showing up at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2007, leaving him and bassist Mike Anthony to go it alone.
The question of whether Sammy quit Van Halen or was fired doesn't really get answered in "Red," as far as I can tell. One thing it does do, though — "Red" is hot enough to burn bridges.
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